You’ve got a new email! Holy smokes am I going to get pinged a lot if I turn on the newly announced Gmail and Google Calendar push notifications on the Google Mobile iPhone app. Google just announced the new feature and it’s a logical one, but it also seems like a throw-back to a simpler time when push notification for any and every email made sense.
There’s no ability to set rules, to limit notifications to just emails from contacts, or anything. Just push notifications. For calendar that might make sense, but I’m already getting SMS messages ten minutes before my calendar events. A push notification is a beautiful thing, but I don’t think it makes a lot of sense anymore in this context.
Push notifications are good for breaking news, they’re good for regular reminders and sometimes they can be useful for social media comments and feedback. But mark my words, if the future is going to be all about tackling information overload – very few people are going to want bulk email push notifications.
See also Boxcar, probably a better choice.
